Data Compression

Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that should be saved or transmitted and this particular process is quite important in the internet hosting field as info located on hard disks is usually compressed to take less space. There're various algorithms for compressing info and they have different efficiency based on the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. This method needs a lot of processing time, therefore an internet hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An instance how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is significantly faster and better than every other algorithm on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the shared website hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is among the best algorithms out there and positively the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data quicker than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will quicken any kind of site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is present. This high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, that is provided by the large number of clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition to that, LZ4 enables us to generate several backups of your content every day and have them for a month as they'll take much less space than typical backups and will be generated much faster without loading the servers.